Author Topic: poll for the "1 BTS for transfer" proposal  (Read 78620 times)

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Offline merivercap

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1.  The referral program is one key to  success for Bitshares and Bitcash.  It's an extremely efficient way of allocating marketing resources.   If anyone thinks a product sells itself without any marketing that person doesn't understand business.  The technology is important, but any other system can emulate or even fork features so that makes marketing and distribution more critical.  Dropbox, Paypal, Square and many other companies have used referral systems extremely effectively.

2.  The referral program attracts and provides an incentive for a variety of businesses to use and build applications on Bitshares.  It provides some sustenance to these businesses.  Most other businesses that build on Bitcoin or other ecosysems are not sustainable.

3.  The price someone is willing to pay reflects the value something provides.  Bitshares has to be useful. Fees help us identify areas where we are solving the biggest problem.   We can solve a problem for merchants if we make it easy to use, charge lower processing fees, eliminate chargebacks, and bring in new potential customers.  We can solve problems for those that don't want to or can't use traditional banking systems.   Those users and merchants should be willing to pay fees.   Peer-to-peer payments are already free with Alipay, Wechat, Unionpay in China and it's free in the US with Paypal, Square, Facebook, Apple(soon) ..all these companies already have a huge network effect and billions to spend on marketing.  We can go after peer-to-peer payments later.  It's not wise to use resources to go against these giants directly.

4.  The fees are not the biggest issue, but in China I understand that overall prices are lower so regional pricing makes sense.

5.  The Bitshares system doesn't need to earn a profit in the beginning.  It just has to pay for marketing, witnesses, and software development.   All we have to do is set the bare minimum network fee for sustainability.  We can have a small budget for ongoing core development, but rely on FBA's for advanced features.   

6.  What if we:

a. Determine the lowest sustainable fee structure that will pay for witnesses and a reasonable amount of software development and maintenance in the long run.  This will be the network fee.  It can be in dollar/yuan terms. 

b.  Create a flexible fee structure so that certain Smartcoins (bitUSD,bitEUR), UIA's, Privatized bitAssets, FBA's can charge an additional fee to pay for marketing costs and utilize the existing referral program as is.  We can allow other Privatized bitAssets (TCNY) or Smartcoins (bitCNY) to charge no additional fee and find a way to market itself with no money and no referral program... or possibly find outside VC money for marketing somehow.

What do you guys think?
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Offline abit

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i am right that the tradingfees are not going to the referrals?

i think the real problem is that, not every fee is shared with the referral.
Trading fee? You mean %-fee? If so, it's set by the issuer and go to the issuer for sure, why referrals?
I believe the 10 BTS order placing fee is shared with referral program.
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Offline Shentist

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i am right that the tradingfees are not going to the referrals?

i think the real problem is that, not every fee is shared with the referral.

i agree that we should not change every day something. makes no sense if we want to get more people on board.

but it is obvious that our community lack the bigger picture

"in which business are?"

i think this is the fundamental problem here.

to pay for BIPS10 is the way better approach. We are more fexible this way. I think it is or was a mistake to not consider that 1 set of transferfee would be enough.

Offline kenCode

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I just read like 20 times in this thread that the referral program is not effectif ...

The referral program is not about giving us 100.000 new users in 3 month ! Come on !
It's about incentive people to find ways to promote BitShares. So they can have cool revenues in the furture if they do it well.
As far I can observe, it's working pretty well after only 90 days !

Are you incentivized after 90 days?

Since I read about BitShares the very first time because of the beauty of the project and much more since last year when BM explain how the ref. prog. of BTS 2.0 would work. So, much more than 90 days.

How many accounts have you signed up?

Around a dozen.  As I said, we will start now to refer. Untill now it was just preparation, finishing the website, the forum, our tokens system and our introduction videos.


How many of those accounts have made more than one transfer?

Not a lot, why would they, they are not trader but investors. There is not a the moment a lot of things you can do with you bts except for trading. KenCode, Ronny, and others are changing this, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Can you support your marketing efforts with the funds you've earned from referrals, if any?

Obviously not ! Using the BitShares referral program is an investment in time, money or both. I guess you know how an investment works ? First you put time and money on the table for nothing but the expectation of future and bigger returns.

Is it worth your time?

It depends. If you like the philosophy of BitShares, the peole in the community pushing hard this porject, reading and writing about it and evolving your very own little project on it with your friends ... off course is "worth" my time. Even if I never win more than 500 bts with it, I will have learn a lot and mostly, I will have TRY !

I simply don't see it "working" as envisioned.

The huuuuuge network effecf will come one day but we also have a responsability in its coming. Bitcrab is doing a good job trying to fix something in BitShares he perceive to be wrong. His way of doing that is maybe a little aggressive and inflexible. I mean the result of his thread is 10 pages with animosity about fees below the strickly minimum to be sustainable ... hmm

I'm very thankful for my free LTM, because I would not pay the fee for a LTM and I just don't see that many others willing to either.

Waouw, you have it for free ! That's cool ! No reason to not be happy ;p

But that's just been my experience, yours may vary.

Yes it varies  :P


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Offline EstefanTT

I just read like 20 times in this thread that the referral program is not effectif ...

The referral program is not about giving us 100.000 new users in 3 month ! Come on !
It's about incentive people to find ways to promote BitShares. So they can have cool revenues in the furture if they do it well.
As far I can observe, it's working pretty well after only 90 days !

Are you incentivized after 90 days?

Since I read about BitShares the very first time because of the beauty of the project and much more since last year when BM explain how the ref. prog. of BTS 2.0 would work. So, much more than 90 days.

How many accounts have you signed up?

Around a dozen.  As I said, we will start now to refer. Untill now it was just preparation, finishing the website, the forum, our tokens system and our introduction videos.


How many of those accounts have made more than one transfer?

Not a lot, why would they, they are not trader but investors. There is not a the moment a lot of things you can do with you bts except for trading. KenCode, Ronny, and others are changing this, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Can you support your marketing efforts with the funds you've earned from referrals, if any?

Obviously not ! Using the BitShares referral program is an investment in time, money or both. I guess you know how an investment works ? First you put time and money on the table for nothing but the expectation of future and bigger returns.

Is it worth your time?

It depends. If you like the philosophy of BitShares, the peole in the community pushing hard this porject, reading and writing about it and evolving your very own little project on it with your friends ... off course is "worth" my time. Even if I never win more than 500 bts with it, I will have learn a lot and mostly, I will have TRY !

I simply don't see it "working" as envisioned.

The huuuuuge network effecf will come one day but we also have a responsability in its coming. Bitcrab is doing a good job trying to fix something in BitShares he perceive to be wrong. His way of doing that is maybe a little aggressive and inflexible. I mean the result of his thread is 10 pages with animosity about fees below the strickly minimum to be sustainable ... hmm

I'm very thankful for my free LTM, because I would not pay the fee for a LTM and I just don't see that many others willing to either.

Waouw, you have it for free ! That's cool ! No reason to not be happy ;p

But that's just been my experience, yours may vary.

Yes it varies  :P

« Last Edit: January 28, 2016, 10:19:38 pm by EstefanTT »
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Offline Tuck Fheman

I just read like 20 times in this thread that the referral program is not effectif ...

The referral program is not about giving us 100.000 new users in 3 month ! Come on !
It's about incentive people to find ways to promote BitShares. So they can have cool revenues in the furture if they do it well.
As far I can observe, it's working pretty well after only 90 days !

Are you incentivized after 90 days?

How many accounts have you signed up?

How many of those accounts have made more than one transfer?

Can you support your marketing efforts with the funds you've earned from referrals, if any?

Is it worth your time?

I simply don't see it "working" as envisioned.

I'm very thankful for my free LTM, because I would not pay the fee for a LTM and I just don't see that many others willing to either.

But that's just been my experience, yours may vary.
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Offline CLains

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1. Keep referral program
2. ~~Percentage-based transfer fee
3. ¿¿¿Problem???
4. Profit

Offline Tuck Fheman

and 95% of them are not even once used. it looks to me on openledger-reg i will find similar results. so most people are looking and not using. if this are the normal
numbers we really can lower our transaction fees, because the referral program is not working like intented.

Yep. They sign up, possibly get some free token from OL, make 1 transfer and that's it, they're done. 

Why is that?
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Offline EstefanTT

I just read like 20 times in this thread that the referral program is not effectif ...

The referral program is not about giving us 100.000 new users in 3 month ! Come on !
It's about incentive people to find ways to promote BitShares. So they can have cool revenues in the furture if they do it well.
As far I can observe, it's working pretty well after only 90 days !

As an example, with two friends we have been working on www.bitsharesfcx.com/ for about a year. We translated like crazy everything available in french, BTS 101, the client, bts.org, the infographics, articles, ... we learn HTML, CSS, some PHP and MySQL to code a web page with a forum and much more coming in the next months.

There is hundreds of hours of work there ! This work more the expenses didn't cost even 1 single bts to BitShares. Thanks to the referral program !

Now if you check how many person we have referred ... not a lot !
Why ? Because we are just starting ! We'll finish our 2 first videos soon and we will start to speak about us and bts in every single french speaking place in the web where people speaks about economy, cryptography, crpto curreencies, ...

This is just one tiny example of what effect can have the referral program. 

My point is, it works PERFECTLY !


About the fees, I think this thread wouldn't even exist if the persons in favor of the Bitcrab would have read the prefect solution of the "% fee with low and high cap". This can't be even a debate, because it would make everybody happy, chinese community, american, europeen,  referrers, businesses, ... everyone HAPPY !!!

Is there even one good argument out there why this is not the solution to this pointless debate ?
(I hope noboby will bring on the table the 3M bts cost because it's really nothing compare to the amazingness of the proposal and the peace that will bring in this community)

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Offline CLains

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I don't see why you have to bring the referral program into it. The various fees and the referral program are different things. We should not change the referral program, as it has proved to be a great motivator for people who actually do something, and it would undermine all trust in the system for a very long time.

When it comes to various fees that's an entirely different matter. We need an intelligent fee structure that creates the right balanced incentive for users and referrers alike. What is the right balance? Currently the main objection to fees seems to be that it is too high for low transfers. The obvious solution is percentage-based fee system.

In the end there isn't really a big conflict between the referral system and the fees, because nobody will be able to get any referral fees if nobody is willing to use the system. So there's no need to construct the situation in opposition like that.

Offline fav

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if "fav" as the biggest referral (i don't count openledger) could talk about his experience it would be easier to understand what it means to him and bitshares to lower the fees.


I did this already

here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20653.0.html and here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20929.msg270924.html#msg270924

thanks for the info!

i took the time to check most of the created accounts http://cryptofresh.com/u/fav
and 95% of them are not even once used. it looks to me on openledger-reg i will find similar results. so most people are looking and not using. if this are the normal
numbers we really can lower our transaction fees, because the referral program is not working like intented.

i personal think we should look to provide solutions for existing communities to make it easy and create solutions to count or give access via our blockchain.
our webwallet could be used for everything.

- gives access to a website
- create and count every project you can think

maybe it is not useful to go out and aquire random people. maybe it is better to look into communities who in need for some product like ours.

no, as I mentioned in my AMA thread. it's all about numbers. you can't come to a conclusion with just 100 refs, and literally no features on the dex for people to use.

Offline Shentist

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if "fav" as the biggest referral (i don't count openledger) could talk about his experience it would be easier to understand what it means to him and bitshares to lower the fees.


I did this already

here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20653.0.html and here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20929.msg270924.html#msg270924

thanks for the info!

i took the time to check most of the created accounts http://cryptofresh.com/u/fav
and 95% of them are not even once used. it looks to me on openledger-reg i will find similar results. so most people are looking and not using. if this are the normal
numbers we really can lower our transaction fees, because the referral program is not working like intented.

i personal think we should look to provide solutions for existing communities to make it easy and create solutions to count or give access via our blockchain.
our webwallet could be used for everything.

- gives access to a website
- create and count every project you can think

maybe it is not useful to go out and aquire random people. maybe it is better to look into communities who in need for some product like ours.


Offline fav

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if "fav" as the biggest referral (i don't count openledger) could talk about his experience it would be easier to understand what it means to him and bitshares to lower the fees.


I did this already

here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20653.0.html and here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20929.msg270924.html#msg270924

Offline Shentist

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i don't get why so many people are so pumped up and i don't get why we need to make right now a decision on this case?

question should be: will lowering the transaction fees bring more users?

- some people think - yes
- some people think - no

but no party can prove their position with facts.

if we lower the transaction fees to 1 BTS what will happen to the referral program? is it dead?

- for this decision, can any referral talk about his numbers?

- how many accounts are created and used?
- how many fees got collected?

if "fav" as the biggest referral (i don't count openledger) could talk about his experience it would be easier to understand what it means to him and bitshares to lower the fees.

personally i think if we have a better product our fees can be higher and i think it is maybe to early to change some parameters yet. We should wait and look how we get traction after
STEALTH. The problem with changing right now will be that "maybe" more people will joining and transering, but we can not tell if it was STEALTH or that we lowered the fees, why
people joined our platform.

Offline yvv

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The problem is also that 80% of fees are paid to referrer. This is a way too much. Referral program should help to set up new users, not to enslave them. All bitshares holders are motivated enough to refer new users, since it helps the network to grow and raises the value of BTS. Paying $100 to get out of referral slavery is ridiculous. Referrer should get just enough BTS to compensate his/her expenses, all the rest should be paid to the network.